Sports Equipment Is Becoming More And More Popular. Tight Pants Are Threatening The Jeans Market.

20 years ago, western style clothes were the official clothes such as workplace and so on, but now they are gradually replaced by sportswear suits. Behind this change, fitness is becoming the mainstream lifestyle pursued by middle and high-end consumers.

In this trend, yoga, fitness and other sports necessary tights began to occupy people's wardrobe.

For a time, whether Instagram has hundreds of millions of fans such as Kim Kardashian, Kendall Jenner and other star supermodels, or young people in Europe and the United States are wearing different colors or all kinds of tight pants with various patterns as "street clothes", and the boundaries of dressing scenes are further broken.

According to Edited, a retail research firm, there are more than 11000 kinds of tight pants available to consumers.

Fashion trend is a cycle. Tight pants are a pair of tight trousers from waist to feet. In the early 1980s, they became popular with the rise of fitness and aerobics. In 2005, they were used as mini skirts, and in recent years they were paired with T-shirts by younger generation of consumers.

Interestingly, this situation was met by a protest against Maryann White, a mother with 4 sons at the end of last month.

Maryann White wrote in a letter to University of Notre Dame and the Virgin Mary Maria women's College joint school newspaper "The Observer." I hope that female students can not wear tight pants for fashion, because too close design will cause men to have bad ideas or actions.

In the next two days, students from University of Notre Dame and Maria's women's College wore their tight pants to protest. They also launched the topic of #leggingsdayND on Twitter and other social media platforms, causing widespread concern.

The Observer subsequently responded that the editorial office received more than 35 letters of attack after the report was released, and the topic continues to ferment in social media.

New York Times's fashion director, Vanessa Friedman, wrote in a related article that the controversy about tights is that it has different meanings for people of different ages. For Y generation, tights are symbols of life style, representing health and vitality rather than daily work clothes. But in the younger generation of Z, tight pants are a basic single product like jeans.

In fact, this is not the first time that such products have been criticized for being tight pants. The industry is not surprised.

In 2017, United Airlines launched a public debate over the ban on boarding two female passengers wearing tight pants, and raised a debate over whether the tights are trousers.

All kinds of controversies are a good opportunity to win eyeballs in the eyes of sportswear retailers.

After United Airlines' tight pants incident 'was sounding, the German sportswear brand Puma immediately said that it would provide 20% of tight pants product discount to consumers holding the airline ticket, and take the opportunity to enhance its image.

Adam Patrick, director of global brand marketing at Puma, said in an interview that tight pants are trousers. Women of any age can wear tight pants that they want to wear at any time. "This is what Puma wants to express."

Another sports brand lululemon, which is mainly made up of Yoga apparel, has become the biggest dark horse in the industry in recent years.

Lululemon was founded in 1998 by founder Chip Wilson in Vancouver, BC. He caught the niche of yoga as a niche market, and added some technology elements to the market's functional defects in the market to improve the market. In order to display different designs, lululemon also set up yoga pants wall in online stores.

According to fashion headline data, lululemon sales surged 26% to 1 billion 160 million US dollars in the fourth quarter of February 3rd, and net profit surged 82% to 218 million US dollars.

Chief executive Calvin Mcdonald said in a statement that 2018 was the most powerful year for lululemon. In the future, it will continue to accelerate the global layout and plan to add 40 to 50 stores, with the goal of achieving an annual revenue of 1 billion US dollars in 2020.

What it means is that Nike, the American sportswear giant, began targeting women's tights in 2017, and set up a sports women's wear monopoly area "pant studios" in 5000 stores.

Nike management said at the time that with the increasing popularity of sports equipment, tights would become new jeans.

At the beginning of this year, Nike launched the first Nike Yoga Collection designed specifically for yoga, not only for female consumers, but also for men's yoga pants and so on, and launched a series of new yoga exercises on the Nike Training Club application.

Some analysts say that Nike will be a major threat to lululemon.

At the same time, Under Armour, which failed the fashion test, also said at the beginning of this year that it would return to the professional sports market and introduce more innovative functional sportswear, including tight pants.

In addition, the trend of tight pants also spawned many new small sports brands, such as Outdoor Voices in the US and Particle Fever in domestic.

Although competition in this subdivision is becoming more and more intense, lululemon, who is the best player, still holds the pricing power.

According to the statistics in 2018, the DSO index of lululemon's product realisation days is 2.38, far exceeding the 32.85 days of Under Armour and 38.1 days of Nike.

What is more alarming to other sportswear brands is that the ambition of lululemon is expanding. From the slogan of "campaign brand inspired by healthy lifestyle", the brand extends its reach to more fields and enters the personal care market. In March this year, it signed the 52 Super Bowl MVP winner Nick Foles as spokesperson.

Calvin Mcdonald predicts that men's clothing will become a new driving force for lululemon's growth in the future, with a target of $1 billion in sales in 2020.

According to a new report by FT Confidential Research, a high-end research service, women spend about 1141 yuan on sports equipment every year, which is more than 1081 yuan for male consumers.

Gartner L2 predicts that the growth rate of men's clothing market will exceed the next two years.

To be sure, the fashion trend of tight pants will not disappear in the near future, and sports brands will not give up this potential market easily.

With the growing popularity of sports and leisure, the international report suggests that Chinese consumers will spend more on sports and leisure clothing next year than luxury goods.